News

DRAWING on long-ago mercantile wealth (don’t mention the slave trade or even, these days, tobacco imports) Bristol has for years rewarded visits by dealers looking for fresh material. But of late the city has been raising its profile as a premier league centre for antiques.

The resurgence of interest from Asian buyers in quality transitional blue and white sleeve vases was seen at Sotheby’s (22% buyer’s premium) in Amsterdam, when this finely painted example, right, illustrating boys presenting gifts to a number of scholars, topped the 243-lot Asian sale on May 21.

Halls Fine Art of Shrewsbury are to change their regular antiques sales from a Friday to a Wednesday from September. The firm’s Welsh Bridge salerooms will open for a pre-sale public viewing on Saturday mornings for its fine art and antiques sales in a bid to attract a wider public audience.

Solutions should cause ‘least distortion’ to the art market: THE Government have launched the review – announced in this year’s Budget – into how they can improve on the current hand-to-mouth system of saving art for the nation.

More than half of the world’s leading collectors are now based in the USA, according to a survey conducted by the New York-based magazine ARTnews. The 13th annual review of the world’s most active collectors of art and antiques – assembled through interviews with dealers, auctioneers, collectors, museum directors, curators, and consultants – found that 105 of the top 200 collectors are American with eight of the top ten spenders from the world’s superpower.

The Antiques and Fine Arts Faculty at RICS (Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors) have appointed a new chairman and vice chairman. Nicholas Somers, who is principal of Nicholas Somers and Company, replaces Jonathan Meyer as chairman supported by a new vice-chairman, Mark Dalrymple, managing director and proprietor of loss adjusters Tyler & Company.

DRESDEN’S Zwinger palace will enter the second phase of its renovation process in September, less than a year after the first phase culminated in the opening of the Porcelain Collection.